An Analysis of Christopher R. Browning's Ordinary Men

Of all the controversies facing historians today, few are more divisive or more important than the question of how the Holocaust was possible. What led thousands of Germans ¿ many of them middle-aged reservists with, apparently, little Nazi zeal ¿ to willingly commit acts of genocide? Was it ideology? Was there something rotten in the German soul? Or was it ¿ as Christopher Browning argues in this highly influential book ¿ more a matter of conformity, a response to intolerable social and psychological pressure?

Ordinary Men is a microhistory, the detailed study of a single unit in the Nazi killing machine. Browning evaluates a wide range of evidence to seek to explain the actions of the "ordinary men" who made up reserve Police Battalion 101, taking advantage of the wide range of resources prepared in the early 1960s for a proposed war crimes trial. He concludes that his subjects were not "evil;" rather, their actions are best explained by a desire to be part of a tea